The complexity of comparative constructions in each language has given challenges to both theoretical and computational analyses. This paper first identifies types of comparative constructions in Korean and discusses their main grammatical properties. It then builds a syntactic parser couched upon the typed feature structure grammar, HPSG and proposes a context-dependent interpretation for the comparison. To check the feasibility of the proposed analysis, we have implemented the grammar into the existing Korean Resource Grammar. The results show us that the grammar we have developed here is feasible enough to parse Korean comparative sentences and yield proper semantic representations though further development is needed for a finer model for contextual information.

The distinction of argument and adjunct has been an important notion in linguistic theories, especially at the interface of syntax and semantics, and this distinction has been believed to be binary and categorical. However, there are some gray-area cases such as instruments and participant locations, for which the distinction does not appear to be so clear. In this paper, I will explore whether the argument/adjunct distinction is categorical by examining the controversial cases, particularly the instrumental PPs. I will review the syntactic, semantic, and psychological criteria and evidence that have been proposed in literature and see if instruments can be categorized as either arguments or adjuncts by those criteria. By showing that different criteria yield contradictory results, I conclude that roles like instruments have characteristics of both arguments and adjuncts, which seems to suggest that the argument/adjunct distinction is not categorical.

It has been widely accepted that English object extraposition can be easily accounted for. However, recent research exhibits the fact that various cases of English object extraposition lead to many empirical and theoretical problems in generative grammar. To account for such cases, the previous lexical constraint-based analyses including Kim & Sag (2006, 2007) and Kim (2008) attempt to give an explanation on the phenomenon. They, however, seem to be unsuccessful in providing an appropriate analysis of object extraposition, mainly due to the mistaken data generalizations. Unlike the previous analyses, we claim that all verbs selecting CP objects allow object extraposition and propose a unified constraint-based analysis for the various cases of the construction. Further, it is shown that as a consequence, this analysis of object extraposition can be naturally extended to subject extraposition. Hence, this unified analysis enables us to further suggest that all verbs selecting CP allow subject and object extraposition in English.

Present study examines L1 transfer effect and UG involvement in the acquisition of binding properties of Korean as second language (L2). The study especially investigates i) whether knowledge from different L1s (English and Chinese) affect the interpretation of binding in Korean as L2 and ii) whether L2 learners of Korean differentiate two Korean anaphors like Korean monolinguals do, based on their knowledge of universal form-function correlation of anaphors. 53 post-puberty L2 learners of Korean with English or Chinese L1, together with 30 Korean monolinguals, were tested over Truth Value Judgment Task with stories, composed of Korean sentences representing various types of binding with two Korean reflexives - caki and caki-casin. The results showed some effect of L1 transfer, though not always. Overall, late L2 learners of Korean seem to know the difference between the two anaphors in their properties related to form-function correlation, though their performance level was lower compared to Korean monolinguals. Detailed pattern of the results and the role of UG in the interpretations of Korean reflexives are also discussed.

This article is a description of the case variation in Guarani Language, which is a relatively, rarely studied language, and more so about case phenomena. Guarani has two remarkable facts about case. First, it has two overt accusative case markers, which are differentiated by the semantic notion of boundedness as in Jackendoff(1990, 1991). The existence of accusative case markers in Guarani is attested by their behavior in the typical transitive verb sentences, the ability to occur in ECM constructions, and the interpretation of specificity which is parallel to Turkish accusative case marker realization reported in Enc(1991). Second, accusative case forms occur in adjunct positions as well as object positions in Guarani. To capture these peculiar case phenomena, an account based on some recent Minimalist ideas about case checking from Legate(2008), Bowers(2010) is shown to be available.

The primary goal of this paper is to find a feasible way to answer the question: Does the similarity in meaning between verbs relate to the similarity in their subcategorization? In order to answer this question in a rather concrete way on the basis of a large set of English verbs, this study made use of various language resources, tools, and statistical methodologies. We first compiled a list of 678 verbs that were selected from the most and second most frequent word lists from the Colins Cobuild English Dictionary, which also appeared in WordNet 3.0. We calculated similarity measures between all the pairs of the words based on the 'jcn' algorithm (Jiang and Conrath, 1997) implemented in the WordNet::Similarity module (Pedersen, Patwardhan, and Michelizzi, 2004). The clustering process followed, first building similarity matrices out of the similarity measure values, next drawing dendrograms on the basis of the matricies, then finally getting 177 meaningful clusters (covering 437 verbs) that passed a certain level set by z-score. The subcategorization frames and their frequency values were taken from the ICE-GB. In order to calculate the Selectional Preference Strength (SPS) of the relationship between a verb and its subcategorizations, we relied on the Kullback-Leibler Divergence model (Resnik, 1996). The SPS values of the verbs in the same cluster were compared with each other, which served to give the statistical values that indicate how much the SPS values overlap between the subcategorization frames of the verbs. Our final analysis shows that the degree of overlap, or the relationship between semantic similarity and the subcategorization frames of the verbs in English, is equally spread out from the 'very strongly related' to the 'very weakly related'. Some semantically similar verbs share a lot in terms of their subcategorization frames, and some others indicate an average degree of strength in the relationship, while the others, though still semantically similar, tend to share little in their subcategorization frames.

This paper aims to propose that Benford's Law, non-uniform distribution of the leading digits in lists of numbers from many real-life sources, also appears in linguistic texts. The first digits in the frequency lists of morphemes from Sejong Morphologically Analyzed Corpora represent non-uniform distribution following Benford's Law, but showing complexity of numerical sources from complex systems like earthquakes. Benford's Law in texts is a principle reflecting regular distribution of low-frequency linguistic types, called LNRE(large number of rare events), and governing texts, corpora, or sample texts relatively independent of text sizes and the number of types. Although texts share a similar distribution pattern by Benford's Law, we can investigate non-uniform distribution slightly varied from text to text that provides useful applications to evaluate randomness of texts distribution focused on low-frequency types.

The primary goal of this paper is to propose methods of enriching two heterogeneous ontologies: Sejong Semantic Classes (SJSC) and KorLexNoun 1.5 (KLN). In order to achieve this goal, this study introduces the pros and cons of two ontologies, and analyzes the error patterns found during the fine-grained manual mapping processes between them. Error patterns can be classified into four types: (1) structural defectives involved in node branching, (2) errors in assigning the semantic classes, (3) deficiency in providing linguistic information, and (4) lack of the lexical units representing specific concepts. According to these error patterns, we propose different solutions in order to correct the node branching defectives and the semantic class assignment, to complement the deficiency of linguistic information, and to increase the number of lexical units suitably allotted to their corresponding concepts. Using the results of this study, we can obtain more enriched ontologies by correcting the defects and errors in each ontology, which will lead to the enhancement of practicality for syntactic and semantic analysis.

This study reviews (i) the (dis)advantages of two major semantic theories of focus, i.e., the Alternative Semantics (AS) and the Structured Meaning Theory (SM), and (ii) the hybrid analysis consisting of these two theories proposed by Krifka (2006). After pointing out a problem of this hibrid analysis, this study attempts to show the third alternative, i.e., the theory of identificational predication for focus can solve this problem.